Harrumph!

As a boomer, I grew up with the excesses of the amusingly epithet-ascribed greatest generation. Those carried along by the tides and storms of WWII indulged themselves from the moment they declared victory. We kiddies got to share in their leavings.

As a group, my parents’ generation rewarded themselves non-stop. Sure, that meant too much booze and a level of adultery not known since the most profligate of ancient periods. To this day, they feel and think they deserve every indulgence.

With that comes the irony of calling my generation and the next several The Me Generation, The Entitlement Generation and other denigrations. We who studied history, sociology and similar soft sciences know those slurs were first applied to the WWII and Korean “police action” sorts.

Regardless, the mythology was and remains powerful. All hail, summa cum laude, the Greatest Generation!

One small piece trace of that legacy is salads.

Yes, boomers grew up with the formerly deprived slathering dressings on. Sure, it was the Greatests’ parents and grandparents who had to make the family work and survive during the Great Depression and WWII. Sure, it was the WWII folk who walked into battle (or were the men and women behind the desks and safe in the defense plants) who risked bullets or paper cuts after their elders had shepherded them through the national economic horrors.

Having landed firmly after V-E and V-J Days, the WWII crew knew it was party time. Among the obvious delights were the self-indulgence of food.

We boomers recalled the weekly visitations of the women’s service mags — McCall’s, Ladies Home Journal, Redbook and others. In most middle-class, white families that really meant one big thing. As surely as the WWI generation grabbed their Reader’s Digest monthly to find out what disease they had to fear this time, the competitive housewives made sure they were up on the latest recipes.

That was a simpler version of today’s foodie snobbery. Now it’s obscure ingredients and must-have food prep gear. Back in the 50s and 60s, it was being sure you were the first, or at least not the last, to serve the pop dishes.

Dreadful they were, but adequate in nutrition, if short on sapidity and devoid of presentation value. It meant, by God!, another tuna noodle casserole variation. It was those dreadful, salt-filled, mouth drying burgers baked in foil with cream of mushroom (always Campbell’s) and dried onion soup mix (always Lipton’s). Accompanying the leaden entrée was some cloyingly sweet mess with colors that do not naturally occur, think an orange Jell-O mold with pineapple junks and mini-marshmallows.

Then both at home and particularly in restaurants, the iceberg lettuce salads were totally dominated by four or five times too much sugary, fatty dressing. A typical dinner table at home or out included two, three or more bottles of gum-thickened, sugar filled mayonnaise disguised as condiment. The very antithesis of light, savory vinaigrette, those clots of extremism marked the WWII generation as surely as did the second and third pre-dinner cocktail.

I thought of those days a decade or more later when working one of my summer college jobs at Cain’s Foods (now Cains and in Ayer not Cambridge). We made and packaged salad dressings, mayo, pickles and horseradish. The famous chips magically happened elsewhere.

Among our short runs on the assembly line were gallons of salad dressings, ketchup and mayonnaise for restaurants. Sure, they carried the Cain’s label like the grocery quarts, but they were different. The old hands (all deaf from the clinking of bottles on the line) said the stuff the chefs got was simply better. The production shifted to condiments that used better materials, richer oils and more fully flavored ingredients. Your perception that the tabletop stuff when you ate out was better was accurate.

One effect of the women’s service mag tyranny was that most of us boomers had little idea what vegetables on their own tasted like. To this day, many of us suffocate salads.If a teaspoon of dressing is good, a quarter cup must be much better. You know…getting your money’s worth…

To no effort of my own, I had the benefit of summering with my maternal grandfather, who grew phenomenal amounts and varieties of vegetables. He  neither accepted nor permitted overpowering his veggies with fats and sugars. If we had asparagus, he’d go down his 150-foot rows with his stainless-steel knife and cut just enough for dinner. We’d eat them minutes later, maybe with a bit of lemon, a dusting of butter and a little salt.

Yet, at friends’ and relatives’, we’d be in the over-consumption mode.  The four bottles of clot-thick bottled dressings fairly screamed to swamp the salad makings. Kids as well as adults lathered it over and on.

In contrast, tossing a salad with say a little white-wine vinegar and a small squeeze of Dijon mustard or perhaps a splash of balsamic with a small portion of olive oil or maybe a scant teaspoon of mayo with some black pepper is all you need…and much, much better tasting. In fact, lightly dressed salads actually let you taste the ingredients, including remarkably enough the veggies.

We don’t have to praise the WWII generation. Lord knows, they’ve done plenty of self-mythology themselves. What the boomers and their kids are learning though is that we don’t have to replicate their food silliness. Too much is not better. It’s just too much.

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Cops, the Gov., our mayor and such are using terms like “self-shelter” or “shelter in place.” They’ve locked down this city and others in area, notably Cambridge where the Boston Marathon bombers lived and Watertown where one died in a shootout with police and the other may still be hiding (or dead).

Closed are all mass transit, stores, public schools, private and public colleges, government offices…virtually everything except Dunkin’ Donuts (not kidding). I first became aware of the reach of this security reaction at a few minutes after 8 this morning. The lifeguard whistled me out of the pool, not for roughhousing, rather because the whole Y was shut down per the mayor’s orders.

On one hand, this is sensible. A single fugitive mass murder is somewhere out here, likely still in the Boston area. He may have and may even be wearing explosive devices, may have hand guns, may be wanting to take out more police or civilians at his own end.

Our advice that is couched as order includes not to open our locked doors to anyone who is not a uniformed, identified law-enforcement agent. We are to stay indoors. That edict covers the 600,00-plus Bostonians and a total of maybe 2 million in the area.

I’ve read and heard much bluster since Monday’s bombings. There’s a pol writing on FB that he’d strangle this guy with his bare hands. In North Station, a Guardsman with military weapons called to a train cop that he hopes they haven’t caught him yet, that he wants to get him personally. In the men’s locker room this morning, a massive early middle-aged guy said locking down Boston was silly and unnecessary, that if the bad guy saw him, he’d be shaking and give up. Yadda yadda.

On another hand, in my decades, I’ve been through various crises here and in other communities. This likely short-lived one differs from all others in that there is no chance for real community.

After 9/11, we here knew too certainly that the ambient hum of commercial planes high overhead was replaced with the unmistakable guttural grumble of fighter jets. Instead of the frequent distant humming, we knew every half hour or so that a death machine was patrolling the Boston clouds, the very skies where two of the hijacker sets flew from Logan through on their hellish missions. Then we were in the streets, yards, offices, bars and elsewhere together. We wept together, were hopeful together, shared our fears and depression…together.

In less stressful times, in big blizzards here, we’d commiserate being without power for days. We’d pile into our streets together. We’d help each other shovel aside four or six feet of snow. We’d make snowmen, no whole snow families. We’d heap snow and ice into tall piles for our kids to slide down. Those whose stoves worked without electricity would cook. We’d share food and milk and wine. We were together.

Here today though, we are isolated. We watch TV and click the net with multiple tabs open. We look at locked front and back doors. We cancel plans. We, as that phrase would have it, self-shelter.

Monday, one of the few blessings following the horror was a combined defiance and sense of community. We weren’t going to be beaten down or cowed by terrorists.

Today, we find ourselves being safe and sensible…and very alone.

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Always a good time for the Haymarket, the winter can be special in small ways. When it’s 17F as it was before 7 AM today, YOU are the crowd. Sure, you need to peek to make sure the greens had frozen, but there is the ease of few customers offset by lifting the tarps to enter the stalls. There’s no quick walk through before returning to your day’s favorites.

The vendors are hardy sorts, who show and set up between 4:30 and 7, even in snow, ice, and whoa-cold! air.

	With the external look of an antarctic encampment, stalls get drapes of tarps to protect vendors and customers as well as produce.
At dawn, front and back sides of Blackstone street are bustling.
	Restaurants also can’t get too hobbled by bad weather. They send folk to buy the cases of veggies and fruits regardless.
Many vendors create large room with hot-air heaters inside the tarps. It’s easier on customers too to lift one tarp and shop two, three or four stalls at once.
	A downside to the super cold is not being able to scan stalls quickly. An upside is knowing the fish vendors have well-chilled product.
“A balmy 36 degrees,” is the report here. Coming from the 17-degree street, it felt like spring inside.

Pix Notes: You’re welcome to anything useful. They are Creative Commons, so just cite Mike Ball once. Click images to enlarge.

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An elegant microcosm of our fustiness appears in a Think Progress piece on a 13-year-old big sister. She’s riled because her little brother wants to use Habro’s EASY-BAKE oven, which the company markets as a girl thing. It is on the company site and catalog in “gifts for girls”, and this girl asks them to get their act together and start including boys in their ads and promotion.

I’m there with her. I’ve been a or the family cook since I was six or seven. My father was a deadbeat Army office who disappeared to Germany with his second family, ignoring all this responsibilities to his first. However, my role model and mentor was my maternal grandfather, Bill Michael, who among many talents and duties cooked and was a tailor.

Oh, he had a stereotypical “man’s” job on the B&O Railroad, but he was like a t’ai chi master, hard and soft at the same time. He saw no shame in honest labor or in food prep or in sewing. He did it all.

His wife, my grandmother Mable, was queen of her kitchen though. She did not allow her two daughters to do more than act as scullery maids. She was the cook and never let anyone forget it. My mother had to learn to cook in Japan from a book for similarly ignorant American Occupation Army wives.

On those rare occasions when Mable was visiting relatives or in the hospital with an asthma attack, Granddad cooked. He had the touch.

First of all, he grew the family veggies, in what he called “patches.” These were one or sometimes two one-acre gardens of remarkable diversity. You don’t know asparagus until you eat it five minutes after being cut, and only those with home gardens know a real tomato plucked as the ripest and most fragrant on the vine.

We loved it when Granddad cooked. We also were savvy enough never to say to her that we preferred his hand in the kitchen.

Yes, let the little boy cook.

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As a counterpoint to my accepting an automated ice-cream maker, I can’t or rather won’t stop kneading bread.

I’m in the middle of the several day process of making salt-rising bread per my maternal grandmother’s recipe. It’s a pain au levain and kind of kitchen magic. While it uses a pinch of baking soda, it has no yeast and the leavening is partly of what bacteria in the air do interacting with the starch of the potato sliced into a quart jar at noon, per Mable’s index card.

The mix sits in a loosely covered jar for half a day to two days and generally, but not always, produces a froth that will rise the bread when added to flour. As Mable’s card says, it has to have a peculiar odor along with the froth. Otherwise don’t use it.

Then you let the dough rise until double, which can take an indeterminate number of hours the next day. Next comes kneading until smooth, from 20 minutes to 35, depending on how much dough you made.

Now there’s the likely spot for automation. I won’t have it.

I own a heavy-duty KitchenAid® stand mixer, replete with dough hook. I’ve tried kneading with the hook, but find no pleasure in that.

Cook folklore has it that the heat from your hands aids in transforming the gluten and the dough into the ideal substance for rising and baking. I’m not sure that’s true, but I do enjoy kneading.

Pressing down with the whole upper body, mushing the dough between my fingers and under my knuckles gives a sense of ownership and oneness with the food. It’s a physical and emotional investment, albeit time and energy inefficient.

I have no doubt using the mixer with its hook would produce smooth dough in much less time. I generally am very efficient, but this is one area where I’d rather not be.

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Many years ago…back in the one-child days…we received a Cuisinart food processor as a gift. Julia Child loved hers and used it regularly; she was a real pulse kind of prep cook.

It didn’t last long in my kitchen and I gave it away. I did and still do like chopping vegetables and kneading bread. I grok the ingredients and feel better about handing out and eating the results. Plus, with your hands and knives, you have a lot more control over the appearance of the veggies. I’m big on presentation.

However, I must admit my current backslide into automation. I recently bought an ice-cream maker. After decades of making my own ice cream, I won’t be giving this one to anyone. For a few years, we would use the old-style, messy, loud wooden bucket with rock salt and ice. That was awful. Then I took to making a quart at a time by hand. I’d get all the ingredients working and return to the freezer every hour or so to hand beat and thus aerate the confection.

That latter operation turned out superb ice cream (not hard to predict from great ingredients). Yet I didn’t have the emotional attachment to the result. A frozen mass looks pretty much the same whether beaten by machine or hand with a spatula or spurtle.

With friends coming up to marry at our home, I figured the reception would have to include one of my favorites, saffron ice cream. So there, I can say it. I made my ice cream by machine last week. I’m surprised at my development, but I’m not ashamed and I’ll do it again.

For detail, I chose the Cuisinart (that name again) ICE-21 machine. It’s widely available around $60, discounted from its suggested $110. Mine came from Amazon, which gave the full color choices. I went with purple (a.k.a. Plum in Cuisinart speak). Honestly white, black and red get old.

It’s almost too simple. There’s an on/off switch on front. Make ice cream by freezing the mystery-liquid filled tub overnight, mix your ingredients (milk, cream, sugar, flavorings), put the tub on the machine and place the plastic paddle inside, turn it on and pour in the ingredient mixture. In 15 to 20 minutes, you have soft serve. I like it firmer and froze it for a few hours. I don’t miss the repeated hand beating.

As a cook, I use my 30-some-year-old traditional steel French chef’s knife and similar tools. I like sturdy in the kitchen. So when I first touched the paddle that goes in the drum, I projected trouble. It felt like Cracker Jack-prize quality. The machine and drum are heavy. The paddle is well deigned for the machine though. It locks into place inside as the drum turns, moving the potential ice cream over its blades. It’s like your fingers dipped in the lake over the side of a moving canoe.

The other eyebrow raiser is the lidless outer case. The clear shell that fits over the drum has no top, just the circle where you pour your goodies. We regular blender and mixer users could see messy trouble. Nah. Just follow the proportions to make a quart and a half or less of ice cream and the mixture stays put. The drum is not sudden or fast enough to spit anything toward you or the ceiling. Over filling the drum would be the only dumb move.

I confessed my automation to the wedding guests. No one minded. In fact, I don’t think they listened. Saffron ice cream is saffron ice cream, not matter how it gets mixed.

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After some healing, I’m still limited athletically but got the OK yesterday from a physical therapist to go back to elliptical machines…provided I do not use the arms. Apparently my broken ribs are merely painful and my multi-fractured clavicle is half fused. Towering, grinning Jeff in Beantown physio agreed with the surgeons that I needed to be very careful about weight bearing and muscle straining for another six weeks.

And this is prime bicycling season. It grieves me.

I’d done the boring stationary bike, while being specifically forbidden from real cycling. Yet, I’ve had passionate, sweaty, prolonged encounters with the West Roxbury Y’s Cybex Arc Trainers and was pleased to do some real exercise after a month and a half walking and that stationary bike-like object.

I was intellectually but not emotionally prepared for the predictable side effect of having lost a substantial amount of weight. The machine measures energy expended and reports the calories. It starts with you setting the type of program, the time, the exertion level and your poundage.

This time, I weighed about 14% less than the last I used an Arc Trainer. Sure enough, despite soaking my shirt and shorts, I saw about 250 fewer calories used in the hour.

I was mildly disappointed, but this is what is supposed to happen. By the diet cliché, when you lose weight, you use fewer calories when you exercise. You simply aren’t lifting and moving the same amount around.

Of course there are numerous wild cards here. For one, despite the medical/nutrition chant of calories-in/calories-out, the basal metabolism rate for a given rate is ONLY AN ESTIMATE…yours almost certainly will vary. Research on this that looks good to me (Volek and Phinney) finds that at least three-quarters of us don’t fit that highly oversimplified formula.

For another, metabolic rates do change. Age, illness, activity change, and dozens of other factors can up or depress rates. Then there’s also the somatotype, with extremes of ectomorphic and endomorphic bodies not at all following the formula.

Then as I dutifully recorded today’s machine report on my sweaty hour, I briefly mused, why do I bother? I have carefully recorded caloric intake and expenditure for years. I have found poor correlation for the amount of aerobic exercise I do (a typical day would have me losing between 0.39 and .75 pounds — absurd and it doesn’t happen). My niece and my mother before us similarly kept records. We measured and weight, as well as used the package nutrition figures and the diet software’s figures. Despite the fantasies of doctors and nutritionists that if the calories-in/calories-out calculations don’t work, the answer is not that the patient is delusional, dishonest or inaccurate. Alas, I have good software, keep damned accurate counts and measures, and have to conclude that my metabolism is too efficient.

I do have factors that slow metabolism. I’ve lost more than 10% of my body weight…several times. I am older. Those with a few other factors account for some of the difference. I believe after years of records and a frightening amount of reading and experimentation, that I have to accept that my metabolism does not follow the basal estimate.

As a side note, I think programmers would have a hit with an heuristic nutrition program. Imagine a program that takes several months of calorie input and exercise output, links them to weight and body fat measurements (I do those two once a week), and then adjusts your calculated basal metabolic rate to reality. It would regularly fine-tune the rate, learning as you report your poundage and fat. Then when you saw 0.15 loss for a given day, you’d have some faith in its accuracy. There’s money to be made from us many million dieters!

Back to my question, this is like the other measurements I take. I do keep records. I do learn from them. They confirm or contradict my hypotheses. I personally adapt to the fantasies and failures of doctors and nutritionists. To do that, I need a baseline and data to reference.

After finally accepting that the food pyramid was junk science for me and ending up after my nutrition research with lower carb/higher protein and fat, the daily recording and weekly measurements are more important that ever. I can’t trust my doctor or nutritionist to customize my diet for fat loss and weight maintenance. I have to do that.

Following my bike crash, I feared backsliding and gaining weight/fat. I haven’t, even with dramatically less aerobics. Apparently part of the body healing broken bones is increased metabolism for the healing period. Ah.

Before the wreck, I had begun slowly adding grams of carbs to the diet weekly. The idea in the carb-based diet books is to see what your set point is for carbohydrates. The theory is that the FDA’s estimate of 300 grams per day is wacky and way too high, but there’s some level above the initial low-carb standard of 25 grams per day that will work, and some level that will make you start regaining weight and fat.

So, you are your own scientist and you are the universe of one in the lab. Slowly add carbs and see the effect. Ease off if you have to and if things go real sour, drop back down to that initial 25 grams for a week or two to reset.

I’ll note that I am aware that a scale weight may vary from 1 to 4 pounds naturally and temporarily. You may have a water-weight gain, perhaps from alcohol use. You may be constipated and loaded up. The causes go on and on, but the lesson is not to flip out from a single divergence.

I also believe in weighing weekly. Many people, my wife included, are daily sorts. That strikes me as a bit obsessive and likely meaningless. If I need to adjust, I think a week is a good touchstone.

So, there we (or I) have it. I record daily and measure weekly, knowing that the software reports on the results are inaccurate. Having the reference is important to me. Seeing the graphs of weight and body fat measures are key. In fact, as a mesomorphic sort, I think the body fat number is much more important than pounds. When I lift free weights, I actually get a little heavier, my metabolic rate seems to increase, and my body fat percentage goes down. Weight up and fat down; that’s OK.

This series includes:

Call it Lifestyle on the intellectual and emotional commitment to low-carb
Watching the Struggle on my grandmothers diet woes
Wrestling with Fat on overcoming fear of dietary fats
Hunger? do you starve on a low-carb diet?
Low-Carb Eats on what’s on the menu in the regimen
How Much of What Food on calories-in/calories-out cliché
Dr. Cadaver on mindless trust in group averages
Who’s Counting on body fast v. weight
Part 1 on pants don’t lie

Tags: harrumpher, fat, diet, exercise, nutrtionist

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The mini-kingdom of tonsorial parlors in Hyde Park is undoubtedly Logan Square. Salons and barber shops specializing for black women, white men, black men, Latinos and Latinas, plus nails and braiding abound in a tiny stretch at the start of Fairmount Avenue.

River Street goes south and turns right to head west at the HP municipal building, with Fairmount heading east. It’s that stretch of a few blocks that starts with the Logan Square Barber Shop and sees all those related but different places on both sides of the street.

Yesterday, I got a haircut with folklore and barber lore, then I chatted with a barber specializing in African-American hair. No one seems to know quite how the hair center arrived, but everyone with an opinion seems to think there’s plenty of business for all.

As a sidelight, I recall a lecture a couple of months ago by Anthony Sammarco in the nearby library. His Hyde Park (Then and Now) is harmless enough, basically a photo collection with a little commentary in a series you likely have seen. One aspect that stuck with me was that even before Hyde Park became part of Boston (1912), it had a shopping shtick. Close by Clearly Square (a few blocks west and within sight of Logan Square) was a clothing and haberdashery conglomerate. Two large department stores and fitting shops were where many, particularly area men came for suits and shirts and such.

Now for some inexplicable reason, Logan Square is where hair comes to be snipped and styled.

We around here hopped for yet more restaurants. Alas, several promising ones have open and closed in the past few years. Most recently, first TC’s Coffee couldn’t make a go of the pastry biz and the mother eatery Townsends closed with a whiff of scandal. For those, I loved her baked goods, as did so many, but she apparently did not have the traffic of the likes of the close-by Dunkin’. The restaurant with its full bar (including a remarkable collection of ales mated to the meals), was the political and social club meeting place as well as a virtual home to Council President Steve Murphy. I sat with many pols and others by happenstance, at events, for interviews at one or the other. Lackaday.

However, a few healthy restaurants remain, notably The Hyde (disclaimer, a son works there). 

We have several particularistic churches in the same stretch, but mostly it’s hair and nails. For a bit of humor, the most popular woman’s salon, big, busy and rich went south. Salon Capri was between the two squares and where my wife went. They uber-suburbanized themselves though, planting in Dedham’s Legacy Place, making themselves difficult for former customers to get to as well as more expensive.  That might have been a harbinger of doom for the hair biz here, but certainly was not.

Perhaps symbolic of the vitality of this genre was that Qadosh (oriented toward black women) just took over TC’s Coffee. It had been next to one of those odd little churches. TC’s space is airy, has big windows and benefits from the rehab the restaurant owners had performed on what used to be the preeminent hotel on the Neponset River before it decayed. After a month with not even a hand-written sign of the salon name, Qadosh has painted its door and taken the old TC’s Coffee sign out of its frame, surely in preparation for its own lighted one.

Next is Los Magicos Barber Shop (fairly new), seeming to specialize in Latinos. Across the street is Hair by Changes, a full-service place, doing nails on hands and feet, waxing, tanning, facials and such. Heading west, there’s Mona Lisa Beauty Salon, then Luu & Nails.  Close at hand is Finesse, which claims to service men, women and children, but notes shaves and fades, suggesting more of an emphasis on black men.

Up at the River Street bend, on one side is the Logan Square Barber Shop. Opposite are a braiding salon and women’s salon that notes both they speak Spanish and can relax hair.

On my haircut day, I was in the chair with Al, who is widely called Elvis for his appearance. He spoke of his background as the Wahlberg boys’ barber from his Dorchester days. He is never short of opinions. He could not explain how so many hair joints migrated to Logan Square. However, he was plain that he had been surprised to find his shop the only one left in Hyde Park oriented to white men.

Hyde Park covers a lot of streets, but he may be right. I can’t recall another. When we live in Jamaica Plain, we ended up in Roslindale Square for haircuts and begrudgingly, finally tried Logan Square BS. We like the guys, haircuts and prices.

In several towns, I’ve had black barbers tell me they’d take a chance on my thin, Nordic type hair, but they didn’t know how to cut it right. Here, I’ve cut the hair of two of my sons. One has my kind of hair and the other has the thick, dark hair from my wife’s side of the family. Those require very different skills and electric razor guides.

I stopped by Finesse on the way from my haircut to speak with a barber out front for a smoke. He too couldn’t figure out how so many salons and barber shops concentrated in three blocks. Yet, he said everyone seemed busy and thriving.

Now I can’t stop myself from thinking that if the barber shops and salons do so well, they’ll need to invest their profits. Might they finance restaurants?

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Magazines, websites and I hear even the T and V drown in drug ads. Most of those intend to convince Boomers they’ll sicken and die if they don’t accept the capsule, tablet or pill that treats symptoms they didn’t know they had. Vanity, fear of mortality, peer pressure…who knows what makes these is-the-purple-pill-right-for-you attack work.

On the other hand, in my tiny universe of one, in the past four years, I’ve found an effective diet regimen — opiates.

Probably like other blogs that write on common physical issues, this one gets a fair number of hits related to various aspects of my broken legs. That makes perfect sense, both in seeing how someone else dealt with your condition and in filling in the huge gaps that docs often leave. I look at the info sheets the ER provided me for my broken clavicle and ribs, thinking these are as bad as a Microsoft Office Help system. There’s not enough useful there, and no effort to address common and likely problems.

In that context, I’ll note that I had been losing weight and fat, using a self-customized low-carb/moderate protein and fat nutrition plan. Then coming up on 11 days ago, my big boom threw me to the pavement from my road bike at speed at 20-some MPH, with those fractures, cracks and such. Being unable to exercise in the slightest, I have feared what had been my weekly weigh-in. I still record all I eat, but only two days have had the slightest exercise, and that’s been just over a mile walk up and down this hill. While the amble was slow, halting, painful and demanding, it’s far, far from my normal daily fitness attacks.

Mirabile dictu! After not weighing for the past two Mondays, I dared today, knowing I just had to record the damage and push ahead. By the scale, I was down nearly 10 pounds. I suspect I had been holding some water, as I was at a plateau and that some of that recent drop was soggy tissue giving it up. Nevertheless, to a banged up old guy,not gaining would have been plenty of good tidings.

On the way to the weigh-in, I was on oxycodone, an opiate. Likewise, following my leg surgery and much, much worse pain levels, I had hydromorphone, a synthetic morphine replacing the actual opiate given me in the hospital. In both post-trauma situations:

• I was not hungry when I had the drug in my system
• There was real, substantial weight loss
• My typical nervous response did not turn to food
• I was (almost surely irrationally) terrified

I have known drug addicts in many situations. During my college and professional years working newspapers, I would meet them both on the job and socially. I have never known a plump one. However, I am at a disadvantage (for which I am grateful) in not coming from a family with drug addiction in it.

Still, I fear opiates and other highly addictive drugs. I think at various times in my life, I would have been healthier and more productive if I drank less of an evening. More to the point, I smoked for a decade from my late teens. I was truly addicted to cigarettes and nicotine. Kicking was no fun and took several tries. It was the idea that we’d create a baby that inspired the victory. So, I know I can exhibit addictive behavior.

For both pain drugs, I disdained the doctors and nurses, nurses in particular, who chanted, “Stay ahead of the pain!” They actively encourage what looks like drug abuse to me. At least, they’d have you take the script dosage and stay drugged up all day and night. The idea is that you heal better. The reality is that you would bug them less if you were out of it.

I recalled how they pushed antacids and laxatives and such in hospital. I had no symptom indicating any of the several allegedly preventative drugs and adamantly, repeatedly refused multiple nurses and docs. Likewise, I demanded the minimal morphine dosage over their objections.

Post-hospital and recently post-ER, I weaned myself from the opiates quickly, preferring a higher level of pain to a possible dependency. That’s not for everyone. I know many who get emotionally wrapped up in pain issues and who take analgesics daily and more for any cause. Coffee is a drug for me, as is a drink. Thank you very much.

Alas, the current opiate was to help me sleep at night and manage during the day. Turns out, that wasn’t true in my case. The first full day after the bike wreck, I went with three of the scripted four pink pills. During the day, taking one made me almost pass out and become a dozing drooler. Not cool. At night, one at bedtime kicked in at a half hour, give or take, but only provided two or so hours of rest before the agony of scapula and ribs, that is their related muscles and nerves, had me teary and too, too awake. The cycle repeated if I waited the six hours from the previous pill and dosed again.

I discovered I was better off grimacing and groaning my way into a seated position on a living room couch. That minimized pressure on the torso and chest, allowing more exhausted sleep than the drugs did.

With all the upper body damage, breathing was very painful, coughing almost unbearable, climbing our many stairs (four stories with the basement where my computers are) was very bad down and much worse up. I have reasons to think of pain relief.

I confess on those first few nights of agony, I could understand how junkies and the pain-fleers would double or triple on the dose. I felt the urge. Yet, I went from two pills a day to one to none.

When I can drive again, I’ll swing by the pharmacy where my wife got the pink pills and drop the container off for disposal, as I did with the hydromophone. I’m not quite sure why I am so wary of addictive prescription drugs, but there are many worse compulsions and areas of paranoia.

So to those stuck in acute pain cycles, I advise a bit of self-science. Step back, Newton like, and observe. Do behavior and as in my current case, posture offer relief drugs don’t? Is being shoved into stupor awful to you? Can you manage your pain with fewer doses than the bottle calls for?

I think of a former minister who was on the other end. She said she hated pain and give her anything and everything necessary to take it away. She and I differ.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, pain, drugs, oxycodone

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#1 son called from California to get an update on my broken clavicle. That’s not remarkable. Adult kids do that for parents as well as the other way round.

Noteworthy was the sound of breakfast he was cooking in his background. That is so much like my behavior, which is so much like Wanda, my mother, his grandmother.

I learned an efficiency from her that surprised friends, hers and mine. She taught me to make one efficient trip. Most other folk go out for one visit, say grocery or library or dry cleaner. Not Wanda or those down her line, who plan and spend twice as much as single destination but do all five or six.

In groceries, for example, my late mother-in-law expressed astonishment that I could and would select, clip, organize and use coupons, which she understandably found complex in their limits, sizes and such. Moreover I knew which store I’d do the major shopping in that week and wrote my list in the aisle order I’d find the items in that store. No oversights or backtracking for me…

I suspect my family has more “RAM” than most. I know we have a stronger desire for efficiency.

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